Over the past years, the proximity of art and capitalism has been analyzed through a perspective stressing the proximity between artistic work and post-fordist work. Here the artist is seen as a model for the contempo-rary worker, because of her linguistic and creative skills, which are at the center of contemporary exploita-tion. However, the reason for the proximity lies not only in the social transformation of work, but can be related to the material quality of artistic labour: there is something in the inclination, weight, temporality and materiality of artistic work, which is causing the proximity. The artist not only becomes a model for the con-temporary worker because of his or her (super)creativity, precarious position and diminishing of the life/work relation; something else is at stake here. In my lecture, I would like to show how artistic labour has become visible again, because there is so much stupid, idiotic, wasteful, repetitive, passive work in the core of contemporary capitalism, which continuously has to produce value from even the most meaningless and useless labouring gestures to sustain itself.

Programme: Aesthetic Seminars Spring 2018